- Platform sovereignty may be planned or unplanned, universal or specific, generative or reactive, technologically determined or politically guaranteed. Platform sovereignty is automatic under some circumstances and highly contingent under others, and it may function differently in relation to different components of the platform system. The conditionality of these is a function of how platforms relate to other political, technical, and economic institutions that also manage something (or someone) that is also organized by that platform. When two or more platforms mediate the same thing, site, or person, both making claims on it and providing sovereignty to it, then the two sovereignties generated may be mutually constrained. While one of these forms of sovereignty may be universal in relation to the platform that issues it (always subject to the inversions and reversals noted above), it is also only partial and provisional in relation to other platforms (if it is even recognizable by them at all). These differences may be between how two platforms identify the same thing or between how two different components of the same platform (or different components of different platforms) address that thing. While this multiplication prevents any one User from enjoying unlimited universal sovereign privileges, it also tends to prevent any one platform from capturing all sovereignty-generative components within its whole and monopolizing how sovereignty is made, and for whom and what.
To further outline the platform principle, others can add to and modify this provisional list. Some may want to include, for example, demonetization: how platforms sometimes strip certain things of their scarcity and hence exchange value. Some may focus on how platform design can never account for the accidents that actual platforms bring, but also conclude that well-designed platforms can turn accidents into assets. Some may want to specify how and when a User has rights of exit and entrance from and to platforms. Can you leave, and can you get in? Others may want to explore the organizational logics of technical platforms as exemplified by street grids, punch cards, spreadsheets, circuit boards, and so on. Others may come at it from the other side and ask whether standardization works best when predictable outcomes are desired, whereas customization works best when not, and ask how the generic quality of platforms can and cannot do both at once. The Stack is a machine that becomes a state, but it is also how both become platforms, or at least, as one condition around which their armatures are forced to evolve in relation to platforms. As we will see in the chapters ahead, as platforms like The Stack appropriate technologies of sovereignty previously guaranteed to and by the state, the contemporary coevolution of these organizational forms may be punctuated by new disequilibriums. First, we need to better understand the genealogy of platforms as political models and how they have been deployed (successfully and unsuccessfully) as political machines.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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